WRONG BRIEF = WRONG SOLUTION
Leave a Comment » | 1,340 Views | 0 Comments » |
The narrowest strip of land between North and South America is Panama,
It’s only about 50 miles wide.
But it’s wide enough to separate the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans.
For ships, this meant sailing thousands of miles south.
Then through the terrible storms at Cape Horn.
Then thousands of miles north again.
Obviously it made sense to dig a canal across this strip of land.
The French didn’t see it as a problem.
Especially as they’d just built a canal twice that long through Egypt. The Suez Canal.
They thought if this was half as long it should be half as difficult.
And in 1880, Ferdinand de Lesseps began building.
But it wasn’t half as difficult.
It was much, much more difficult.
Men began dying from malaria, a problem they hadn’t had in Egypt.
Because Egypt was a desert, whereas Panama was a jungle.
So there were many, many more insects everywhere.
Since insects were obviously the source of malaria, the brief was also obvious.
Stop them crawling onto the beds and biting people.
The solution was ingenious.
Insects can’t crawl across water, so use it as a barrier.
And they dug trenches around their tents and huts, and filled them with water.
And in the hospitals they placed a saucer of water under the legs of each of the beds.
And it worked.
Every morning the saucers and the trenches would be full of dead insects.
So why were people still dying of malaria?
It made no sense.
The brief was to stop the insects crawling into the beds and tents
They’d done that.
If malaria wasn’t coming from the insects, how could they fight it?
The answer was, they couldn’t.
The French were forced to abandon plans to build the canal.
In 1893, after 13 years, and 22,000 dead, they went home.
What the French hadn’t allowed for was that their brief was wrong.
It was true that insects were the source of malaria.
But not the insects that crawled.
The insects that flew.
Mosquitoes.
They didn’t drown in the water in the saucers and trenches.
In fact the mosquitoes would breed in standing water.
Which is exactly what the trenches and saucers provided.
So not only didn’t they solve the problem, they made it worse.
But the French hadn’t questioned the brief.
And when it didn’t work, they gave up.
The Americans had a different attitude.
To them, brief isn’t sacrosanct.
If the answer doesn’t work, maybe the brief is wrong.
So they came up with a different brief.
Not to solve the problem of crawling insects.
To solve the problem of mosquitoes.
In 1904 they started work.
But not on the canal.
First they started work on the mosquitoes.
They made sure all pools of standing water, within 200 yards of their camps, were drained.
Where they couldn’t be drained, oil was poured onto them.
Where oil wasn’t enough, carbolic acid and caustic soda were poured into them.
They killed every mosquito anywhere near the canal.
And, just to make sure, all buildings and all beds were screened.
So none could possibly fly in while people slept.
They finished building The Panama Canal in 1914.
Two years ahead of schedule.
It took the Americans 10 years to totally complete the job.
It took the French 13 years to fail and give up.
What was the difference?
You can’t get the right solution if you’ve got the wrong brief.
Posted: October 11th, 2011 | Author: will.armstrong | Filed under: Customer Champions | Tags: Dave Trott, Malaria, Panama Canal, The Suez Canal, wrong brief, wrong solution | Leave a Comment »
Leave a Reply